1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to printing apparatuses, such as printers and copiers, and particularly to print management in a printing apparatus having a counter capable of counting up each time printing is performed.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, copiers have been capable not only of making copies of an original, but also of printing according to print jobs received from external clients, and of externally and electronically transmitting data of a scanned original using electronic mail or file transfer capabilities. Such copiers are called multi function peripherals (MFPs).
Examples of a method for charging for MFP use include counter charging. An MFP has a billing counter that is incremented by one each time a page is printed. Examples of the billing counter include one capable of counting up according to the number of ejected sheets, and another capable of counting up according to the number of faces of sheets (e.g., for double-sided printing, the billing counter counts up twice per sheet). According to an increment of the billing counter per unit time, an MFP supplier company determines the amount its customer is to be charged. Values of the billing counter are collected periodically on predetermined cutoff dates by an external server or a dedicated application in the MFP.
To calculate the amount of MFP usage of each department or user, job-history managing software for managing job histories has been used. The job-history managing software obtains job histories, adds up the amount of MFP usage of each department or user using the MFP, and generates billing information (see, e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-350936).
Recently, for cost savings and environmental protection purposes, there have been demands for detailed and clarified cost sharing.
Thus, there have been demands that costs determined by counter charging be divided proportionally among departments and users according to the amount of MFP usage calculated by the job-history managing software, and departments and users who actually used the MFP be charged.
However, in the known technique described above, depending on the timing at which a value of the billing counter is obtained and confirmed, the sum of the numbers of printed sheets in job histories for a target period may not match an increment of the billing counter.
The reason is that although a job history is generated upon completion of a job, the billing counter is incremented each time a sheet is ejected.
For example, when a job of printing of a 100-page document starts and a cutoff time for the billing counter is reached upon ejection of 70 sheets, the billing counter is incremented for the ejected 70 sheets. However, since the job has not yet been completed, the number of sheets ejected in this job does not appear in the job history. Thus, there is a 70-count difference between the increment of the billing counter and the total number of printed sheets in the job history.
A description will be given about commercial printing which is carried out using MFPs and is becoming widespread today. In the cases where a large number of copies are printed by a device capable of allowing the user to specify a multiple number of copies, the device may often print, for example, 1000 copies of a one-page leaflet. In this case, due to the problem described above, there may be up to a 999-count difference between the increment of the billing counter and the total number of printed sheets in a job history.